Cross country is hard. It's 3.1 miles or more of hills, soggy grass, mud, and when your really lucky all three plus blazing temperatures or humidity or rain or snow. This year we're skipping all that.
It's safe to say that cross country was not my favorite season for racing. It was more often than not a humbling experience compared to my time on the track and mentally more challenging than anything else I've ever done, but if you can get through 3.1 miles and know you've given it all you've got it's one of the most rewarding experiences there is. That experience becomes 1000x better when you get to share it with teammates.
The team portion of cross country is what really hooked me in. Having participated in track my whole life, I was very accustomed to being a one-woman show until I joined cross country my sophomore year (technically I did participate my freshman year, but I was a team of one 💁). I didn't have a great high school team, you could probably argue that we were pretty bad, but working together we got better meet by meet, year by year until we had a cohesive team of ten or so people who really cared about the sport and one another.
The only thing marginally similar in the running world is a relay, but even then it's very individual. Yes, you rely on your teammates to do their job, share their load of the race, but you run alone. You can't see your teammates ahead of you or have them beside you pushing you along. There's no one working with you saying "let's go" as you pass a competitor together down the final stretch, knowing how much each and every point matters. Being in this sport has given me some of my best friends, mental toughness, and an appreciation for peanut butter smeared on rice cakes and drizzled with honey (my college team's pre-race snack).
After being hired as the Head Cross Country coach at a school in DC this summer I was excited to lead a team of my own toward having these same great experiences I shared with the teams I was a part of. A few weeks ago however I received the official news that cross country was officially canceled for the fall and moved to the spring. It's now sandwiched between indoor and outdoor track in the hopes that come December we'll be able to facilitate "normal" sports again.
Moving meets until the Spring though cross country is still moving forward this fall just remotely. Like most of the schools, ours has chosen a fully remote setting to start the season with the hopes of slowly moving to a hybrid program. Cross country's hybrid might involve meeting once a week for one hour or once a week every two weeks for an hour or not at all dependant on access to facilities. Either way, it's mostly going to be remote.
The good news? Running is one of the easiest sports to move to a remote setting in terms of getting training done. The bad news? It might be one of the easiest sports to facilitate remotely, but going remote removes all of the benefits of joining a cross country team, all of the great things I and I'd like to believe many others out there love about it.
Sure on an online platform, I can employ all the same training and even specialize it more depending on the student. We can create virtual races for athletes to participate in. I can have them complete training logs to review what they're doing and provide feedback. I can even hold zoom meetings to teach plyometrics, hold general strength sessions, and create some sort of team communication with my athletes, but the things that are missing are the things that make cross country what it is. Some things no matter how hard you try simply don't translate to an online platform. You lose the accountability that comes with having others to train with and a coach that's present. You lose all the small moments, easy run chats, shared hatred of mile repeats, that feeling of finishing a workout faster than you thought alongside your teammate, that create friendships and lifelong memories.
I'm not trying to get too sentimental here, but I recognize how much of joining cross country is for social interaction rather than competition or love of the sport. In my own experience, it was the friends I made that kept me willing to participate, not an intrinsic motivation to be there. I've already lost two runners to that very dilemma and I don't blame them. Without a team cross country is just running and with no real tangible meets on the horizon, it's just training with no clear end goal.
With school and the season officially starting up, I was tasked with writing up a description of what cross country will be like this fall for incoming students as a way to try to encourage participation. As I started trying to type up all the benefits of joining cross country apart from physical fitness, I hit a wall and the realization that this fall sports really were canceled. Calling any sport that's going online or remote a sport is far from the truth. No matter how good you can simulate training through a well- structured training plan you or how well you can explain and demonstrate a drill via a zoom call you lose too much. You lose all the intangible and unmeasurable things of real value that come from team participation.
As far as I'm concerned this fall I'm not coaching a cross country team. This fall I'm coaching individuals to get in shape and maintain fitness for some small glimmer of a chance that come December things change. My job now entails attempting to figure out how to create some meaningful social interaction via a screen for my team members while holding out hope for an in-person meeting.
Until then I'm all ears for suggestions on team bonding via zoom apart from trivia because aren't we all sick of it by now?
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